


The Willow Tree

by jmh1



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mortal, M/M, Minor Character Death, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 20:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21124583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmh1/pseuds/jmh1
Summary: Solangelo Soulmate AU





	The Willow Tree

Finding your soulmate is a complicated business. First there’s the words. Once you turn sixteen, you find the next words you’ll hear your soulmate say. They might not say it to you, but you’ll hear it, and when you do the words change. They keep changing until you complete the connection. Some people don’t get any words which means one of three things – you’re deaf, your soulmate is mute, or you’ll never meet your soulmate. One thing you never want to see is a name in red. Because when you’re soulmate dies, regardless of whether you’re sixteen, their name appears, and it’s up to you to find them, and set their soul free by completing the connection. Second is the feelings. Once you reach sixteen you begin to feel any pain or intense emotion that your soulmate feels. Third is the tattoos. When you reach sixteen, any tattoos your soulmates has or gets appear on your own skin. People used to do this to try and find their soulmate, but they soon realised that you can’t see your soulmate’s tattoos until you complete the connection.

11:58:03

It’s two minutes until I turn sixteen. Mom tried to convince me not to stay up, but I’m a hopeless romantic and I’m desperate to know the first, or next, words I’ll hear my soulmate say. I don’t care that they may not be said to me. It’s still a connection to the person I’m destined to spend the rest of my life with. Mom also tried to warn me that I may be disappointed. She never had any words until two years ago, when her soulmate died in a car crash. My parents were never soulmates. My dad apparently knew his, but he died years ago, and Dad never stayed in one place long. My mom knew that at the time, and he never resented him for leaving, even though she’d been about to tell him she was pregnant. She never told him about me, because she didn’t want him to feel like he had to come back.

11:59:23

11:59:24

11:59:25

The seconds seem to take forever to tick. I know it’s stupid to be this excited. It isn’t like I’m suddenly going to find out who it is. But just knowing that I have some clue to identifying my soulmate – the one person with who I can share anything, the one person who will love me truly unconditionally – is enough that even if I hadn’t decided to stay up, I’d still be awake. I would not have been able to sleep.

11:59:48

I probably still won’t be able to sleep even when I know the words. There’ll be so many thoughts running through my head.

11:59:49

I lie back on my bed, resigned to waiting out the eternity of the last eleven seconds of my unmarked life.

11:59:50

But I can’t help watching the clock.

11:59:51

That red light counting its way down to the moment the writing appears on my skin.

11:59:52

I shut my eyes tightly. Maybe if I don’t watch the clock, time will seem to go quicker. I take a peek out of the corner of my eye. I just can’t help myself.

11:59:55

I count down from five in my head, not looking at the clock. On zero I start to cry. I have no idea why I’m crying, until I realise it’s not me who’s upset. It’s my soulmate. Whoever he is – or she, I may have a platonic soulmate – something awful has happened. Apparently, my mom hears me.

“Will,” she says as she comes into my room. “Will, are you alright?”

I nod. “It’s not me,” I say. She nods and starts to sing gently. Mom is an amazing singer, and hearing her voice always cheers me up. Slowly, the involuntary sobs stop, though a dull ache remains in my chest.

Three days later a beautiful tree, a weeping willow, appears on my arm, shoulder and chest. I still hadn’t looked at the words that I knew were printed on my wrist.

I got my first tattoo the day before my sister’s funeral. The receptionist at the tattoo parlour was convinced I wasn’t eighteen, but I had the ID to prove it. It was the day my sister’s soulmate tracked me down. My sister had died three days earlier, and when I saw a young man – maybe nineteen or twenty – with _Bianca di Angelo_ written in red on his neck, I ran. Fortunately, Jason had been with me, and spoke to him. The man, whose name I never wanted to know, stood at the back at the funeral, and slipped out as soon as it ended. If I hadn’t been so busy feeling sorry for myself, I probably would have felt sorry for him. Now, two months later, I was turning sixteen. Bianca had been so excited about my words, but now it just felt empty. Bianca had never met her soulmate, she didn’t get any words when she turned sixteen two years ago. My younger half-sister, Hazel, is still excited, and I can’t bring myself to tell her I don’t care anymore. So I sit with her on her bed in our cousin Percy’s apartment, as we wait for midnight. It’s kind of cramped in the apartment. He lives with his mom, my Aunt Sally, and his stepdad Paul. My cousins Thalia and Jason moved in with them about ten years ago, when their mom died. Now Hazel and I have moved in. Our dad was the only one of the three brothers who stuck around, but he vanished when Bianca died. Both our mom’s died when we were little, so we had nowhere else to go. Sally’s pregnant as well. Her and Paul are looking into buying a bigger apartment using the extra child support they get now that they’ve taken us in. Percy, Thalia and Jason have all got part time jobs to help out. It isn’t an easy life, but I’m with the people I love, and that’s all that really matters. I don’t need a soulmate. The clocks clicks over to midnight, and I check the obvious places – wrist, neck, ankle, top of my arm. As I twist to look at my shoulders in the mirror, my shirt rides up, and Hazel spots a bit of writing on my hip. I like it. It’s a nice easy place to ignore.

_Have you seen my keys?_

I smile. A nice, generic one. It’s either someone I already know, or I’ll barely notice when I hear it said. I go to sleep happy.

It actually takes me two months to look at the writing on my wrist. Until then, I keep it covered with a bracelet. At first it was because I didn’t want to think about it when my soulmate was so obviously unhappy. But then I started to overthink it. What if he didn’t like me? What if he was straight? They were silly things to worry about. Two soulmates always feel the same way about each other. If he – I’m sure it’s a guy now, though I have no idea why I think that – doesn’t like me, it means I don’t like him. And if he’s straight, I won’t be interested in him romantically. I still worry though, because I desperately want a romantic soulmate. I don’t know what it is that finally makes me look, but I do. It’s just one word.

_Dickhead._

Of course it’s the hopeless romantic that gets the least romantic words. My friends wasted no time in taking the piss. Neither Cecil nor Lou Ellen will ever meet their soulmate – they have no words. Austin and Kayla, both of who I’ve known practically since birth, are platonic soulmates. Both of them are bisexual, but neither of them have ever had even a hint of attraction for the other. Mitchell, who shocked everyone when he said he didn’t really care about soulmates, had very romantic words.

_I’ve always loved you. Before I knew my words, I loved you. Before I met you, I loved you. When I first saw you on the other side of the street, I loved you._

They wrapped around his upper arm three times. I wish I had words like that. Words that, when I heard them, I would know were meant for me. I would know that they were being spoken by my soulmate. But no, I got stuck with a single word that I could hear ten times in a single day.

A year after I got my words, and I’m the last of my friends, including Hazel who doesn’t even have her words yet, who doesn’t have a soulmate. I actually don’t care, though. I like all my friends’ soulmates and I’m happy. Percy and Jason both knew who theirs were on their sixteen birthdays. Percy’s words were _How did you not realise, Seaweed Brain?_ and he knew immediately that his soulmate was his best friend, Annabeth, for who he’d had romantic feelings for a few years. Annabeth’s words were, _You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to say this for, but I didn’t think you felt the same._

Jason’s soulmate was the girl he’d been dating for about a month before his birthday. _So…what are your words? _That was the first thing that Piper said to him when she phoned him that morning.

Leo, of all people, was the next to find his soulmate, who lived on the other side of the world. They met when they were both on holiday. Both of them refused to tell anyone their words, but when Leo came back to New York after that summer, he’d announced that his soulmate was an Australian girl called Calypso. Thalia found hers on the first day back at school after that summer. Her soulmate’s name was Reyna, and she had just moved to New York from San Francisco.

“Hi, excuse me. Can you help me? I don’t know where Room 21 is,” Reyna had said. Matching the words that were printed on the arch of Thalia’s foot.

Hazel met her soulmate a month ago, she was still only fifteen, but she said her soulmates words, and they immediately hit it off. So far, Leo and Calypso were the only ones whose first words hadn’t been spoken to one another. By the time they met and realised, they’d been staying in the same hotel for two weeks, and Leo’s words had changed eight or nine times, but that was as much as he would tell us.

Now they’re all waiting to meet my soulmate, but I don’t have the heart to tell them that I don’t want to meet mine. It isn’t fair that Bianca should be the only one in our family who never got to meet her soulmate.

The day I first heard my soulmate’s voice was the day I lost my car keys. I probably dropped them while I was staring at Nico di Angelo. It’s no secret with my friends that I have a crush on him. He’s this mysterious, brooding Italian boy in my class, who doesn’t speak to anyone but his friends. And his friends are kind of intimidating. They are all the most popular people in the school. Valedictorian, swim team captain, football captain and Homecoming Queen. That’s why I’ve never spoken to him. I feel inadequate compared to his friends. Sure, I’m on the track team, but the thing my mom says I’m best at, is the one thing I’ll never do in public. Not even in front of my friends. I sing. I know that, objectively, I’m good. By that I mean I can hit notes. I’m just too scared to find out if other people think I’m good. If they like the sound of my voice. But the day I first heard my soulmate’s voice was the day I decided to sing. To clarify, while I _am _a hopeless romantic, I’m not one of those people who believe in absolute fidelity to their soulmate before they find them. I have three reasons:

  1. I might not find them until I’m sixty and I want to experience young love
  2. I might have a platonic soulmate, and I don’t want to have wasted opportunities
  3. If I do have a romantic soulmate, I want it to be perfect. I want to know what I’m doing

Anyway, at some point during the day I had lost my car keys.

“Have you seen my keys?” I ask Cecil, frantically checking my pockets and rummaging through my bag. That was when I heard the word. The word that had officially become my least favourite word in the English language.

“Dickhead,” it was barely a whisper above the general hubbub of the school corridor, but I had kind of become attuned to that word. As always, I stop what I’m doing and look around me, but as per usual I have no idea who said it. The one time that I actually spotted who said it, it was the wrong person. I subconsciously check my wrist.

_Fuck off!_

Surprisingly for me, but I guess probably unsurprisingly for most people, the first thought that goes through my head has nothing to do with the fact that I just heard my soulmate’s voice. Instead, I wonder if he says anything that doesn’t involve swearing. I know I’m trying to find a pattern from only two occurrences, when really I need at least three, but still that’s what I’m thinking.

“That was him,” I say to Cecil. The thought that should have been my first finally getting to my brain.

“What? Your soulmate?” Cecil asks. “What’s he going to say next?” I show him my wrist and he laughs at me. “I think your soulmate hates you,” he says.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I say defensively. “Besides, he doesn’t necessarily say it to me.”

“I can’t wait to tell Lou Ellen,” Cecil says. “Your keys are by your foot, by the way,” he adds, before walking away with a mischievous smile. I actually hate him sometimes.

I hate Will Solace. He’s too perfect. He’s ridiculously clever. Star of the track team. Unbelievably attractive. The main reason, though, is that I’m hopelessly in love with him and have no idea how to talk to him. Despite how perfect he is, he’s actually kind of shy. I just want him to talk to me, because I’m even more painfully shy than he is. The thing is, he has no reason to talk me. Why would he want to? He has plenty of friends, and it isn’t like he’s interested in me. But enough about Will Solace, because I’m at Senior Prom with my friends. Technically I’m here with Reyna, because we played the system so we could all be here, except for Hazel and Frank. Instead of Percy and Annabeth coming together, Percy came with Piper, and Annabeth with Jason. Thalia is here with Leo. Since any senior could bring a plus one, they decided to do that, so that as many of us as possible could come. As soon as we got in, we merged into a group, and the two couples – Thalia and Reyna are platonic soulmates – got back together. If any of the teachers on the door questioned the arrangements, they didn’t bother to say anything.

So here I am, at a prom. I’m actually enjoying it more than I thought I would. Or at least, I am until the head of the Prom Committee comes on stage.

“It’s time for our guest performer,” she announces. “Please welcome to the stage our school’s very own Will Solace.”

I’m pretty sure that my bottom jaw is on the floor. Will Solace can sing? I decide that I hate him more than I did before, and by that I guess I mean that I’m even more in love with him. My friends seem to be having the same reaction – well, the ‘Will Solace can sing?’ bit at least.

“That’s Will Solace?” Reyna asks me. I nod. She’s the only one who knows about my crush. I only told her because she was new and didn’t know who he was. She never tried to find out who he was, but I guess it was unavoidable that she found out tonight. Unfortunately, Piper heard her. Piper has this uncanny ability to tell when people are talking about someone’s love life.

“Will Solace?” she says, shocked and way too loudly, and I know she knows. Our friends all heard her.

“Damn it Nico,” Percy says. “Now I owe Jason ten bucks.”

“Why?” I demand. Because it’s Percy, I don’t know whether the reason is going to make me angry or laugh.

“We had a bet about who was more your type,” Percy explains. I laugh. I don’t class that as making bets on my love life. That would have made me angry. This was just my cousins being idiots.

Will sings a few songs, and I’m amazed. He’s not just good, he’s incredible. I definitely hate/love him more than I did this morning. His voice is raw and emotive, and it literally gives me goosebumps when he sings a slow song. “This next one’s for one of you. I’d say you know who you are, but you probably don’t, and to be honest, you probably never will,” he says with a shy smile

_‘It’s hard to speak, _

_Mumbling my poetry.”_

His voice is kind of deep and soothing.

_‘But talk is cheap,_

_Your body’s saying other things._

_No need to fear,_

_‘Cause the crew is here._

_If tonight your free,_

_Oh, come and get a groove with me.’_

I don’t know the song, but I know I like it. Damn it, Will Solace. Are you trying to make me hate/love you more?

_‘Flowing like no other,_

_Can I get another?_

_Must be nice to look like that._

_Who gave you my number?_

_They deserve a pay bump._

_Who taught you to move like that?’_

I can tell he’s building up for the chorus, and I’m excited.

_‘Say that you want me just to want somebody,_

_Tell me you need me ‘cause I need somebody,_

_None of these lines will ever make you love me,_

_Hurts good to want you,_

_Crave the pain I get from you.’_

For a moment, I swear that I can feel his eyes burning into my back, but I dismiss it. He’s straight, and there’s no way that he could have known I’d be here. He’s probably looking at Reyna, who I’m dancing with. I don’t remember ever starting to dance, but all of us are. Will keeps singing, and I join in when he sings the chorus again. The band stops and it’s just Will, his voice full of the pain the narrator craves.

‘_My head aches, my heart aches, I’m awake, I’m alive,_

_My head aches, my heart aches, I’m awake, I’m alive.’_

He launches into a crescendo for the final chorus. My head is thrown back. I’m drunk on the sound of his voice. I pretend he’s singing this song for me, even though I know he isn’t. I feel empty when he finishes the last note. I don’t want that song to be over. I want to listen to him sing that song on repeat forever.

“Dude, you got it bad,” Percy says.

I flip him the bird. “Fuck off.”

The crowd goes quiet after I sing the song to Nico. Not that anyone knows it was for Nico. But that was when I heard it.

“Fuck off.”

I swear under my breath, cursing the crowd for being so packed. I have absolutely no idea who said it. The crowd begins to applaud seconds after, and I know I’ve lost him. I’ll never find him in that crowd. I glance at my arm, and as I thought, the writing has changed.

_I’m so glad that was empty._

I have no idea what it meant. But at least he wasn’t swearing this time.

I feel it during summer before I start senior year. I’m helping my Aunt Sally in the kitchen when it happens. I put down the knife and sink to the floor, fighting back the tears as unbearable sadness washes over me. I know immediately what’s happening. Someone close to my soulmate has just died. I know because I remember the feeling. I still get that feeling every year on November 23rd. Sally immediately rushes over to me.

“Nico what is it?” she says concerned.

“Soulmate,” is all I’m able to get out as I start to sob. My whole body is shaking. I think my soulmate is taking this worse than I took Bianca’s death, which I hadn’t known was possible.

“Percy!” Sally calls. She knows that while she could comfort me, Percy was the only one who could calm me down when I used to have nightmares about Bianca’s death. Percy steps out of the bathroom, shirtless and with damp hair. He must see me straight away because he doesn’t respond to Sally, but suddenly he’s in front of me, holding my head against his chest.

“Come on, Nico,” he says gently, as he pulls me to my feet and leads me to the living room. I sit on the couch with my head resting on his shoulder and his head on mine. He mutters comforting words to me as he holds me. I don’t what he says, but the sound of his voice is enough to calm me down so I can get control over my emotions again. I try to feel happy to cheer my soulmate up a bit, but I can only think of Bianca.

When mom died, I suddenly understood the tattoo. The pain I felt when the doctors told me she’d gone was the same pain I felt when I’d turned sixteen. I knew then that my soulmate had lost a family member. And when I found I would start crying whenever something reminded me of her, I knew what it symbolised. My soulmate didn’t want to cry anymore, so the tree wept for him. Mom’s funeral is in two days, and I’ve finally tracked down my father. I have a phone number. He doesn’t answer when I ring, so I leave him a message.

“Err…hi.” I start. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. “So, you don’t know me, but I wanted to tell you that Naomi Solace died last week. Her funeral is at eleven on the 24th of August. I know it’s been a long time since you saw her, but I think she would want you there. I think the only way she could have loved you more than she did would have been if you were soulmates. That’s why…That’s why she didn’t tell you about me. My name’s Will and I’m seventeen and I think looking for you is the only thing that’s been keeping me sane this week. So yeah…maybe I’ll see you there.”

I hang up the phone and sit back. I feel a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“I think you’re right. She would want him there,” my grandma says.

“What’s his name?” I ask her. Mom told me everything she knew about him except his name.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she says. “After she finished high school, your mom and I didn’t speak until she told me she was in labour. We didn’t exactly get on when she was young, but when she phoned me that day, I could tell how scared and alone she felt, and that she just needed her mom. She always regretted that you didn’t know him.” Silent tears run down her face, and I put my hand on the tree, drawing strength from it. “Why do you do that?” my grandma asks.

“It’s my soulmate’s tattoo,” I say showing her. “I think he lost someone close to him as well, and he didn’t want to keep crying so he got this. I just want to be strong. Every time I start to feel sad, it intensifies. I think how I’m feeling reminds him of whoever it was.”

I give the eulogy at mom’s funeral two days later. I never heard back from my dad. It’s harder than I thought it would be, but I think my soulmate knows what I’m doing because I keep feeling this positive force surge through me. I keep my hand on my shoulder throughout. I think that’s all that gets me through it. As I finish, I look up. In the shadow of a tree, a weeping willow of all things, there’s a man. He’s not wearing a suit, but he’s dressed all in black. He looks the same age as mom, no older than forty, but he has the same blond hair as me. I can’t see them from this distance, but I know his eyes are blue. I pick up a shovel, and throw a lump of dirt onto her coffin. We’re not Jewish, but mom always loved the tradition, and my grandma and I thought she’d like it. I stand back as everyone else does the same. The small crowd leaves the cemetery, leaving me standing by her grave with my grandma. The blond man walks over.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” she says. I nod.

“Thank you for finding me,” he says. “Leaving her was the second hardest thing I ever did.”

I don’t need him to say what the hardest thing was. He buried his soulmate when he was seventeen. For the first time that day, I lose control. I feel really awkward, just standing there sobbing, but he steps closer and wraps his arms around me. I don’t even know his name, but it feels right.

“It was really brave, what you did,” he says, and I know he’s talking about the eulogy. I nod, not trusting myself to speak. I slowly pull myself together, and we fill in the rest of the grave in silence. It’s not an awkward silence where neither of us knows what to say, but a comfortable silence because we both know there’s nothing we can say. Before we leave, I break a sprig off the willow that he had stood under and put it against her headstone. I know it won’t last, but I need to do something, and I can’t face putting flowers there just yet. He doesn’t ask why.

“You don’t have to stay for long,” I say.

“She told you why?” he asks. I know what he means. Why he doesn’t stay in one place. It’s because he thinks if he stays in one place for too long, gets too close to someone, then that person will get hurt. Because his soulmate died. I nod. “I’ll stay a few days, get to know you. I want to stay in touch, though.”

“Can we do something this afternoon?” I ask.

“What do you want to do?” he asks in response.

“I want to get a tattoo,” I say. He raises his eyebrows, and I explain. “Mom always used to say something when I doubted myself. _Lo hago porque puedo. Puedo porque quiero. Quiero porque dijiste que no podia._”

“I do it because I can. I can because I want to. I want to because you said I couldn’t,” he translated. “She taught you Spanish.” It was a statement not a question.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Apollo.”

“What’s that on your arm, Nico?” Jason asks. It’s early, and I’ve just gotten out of the shower, so all I’m wearing is a towel round my waist.

“A willow tree,” I say, stating the obvious. I don’t get how he hasn’t noticed it before, I’ve had it for almost two years.

“Not that arm, idiot. The other one,” Jason says. If I were a little more awake, and a little less grumpy, I might have realised what he meant. I check my arm.

“Guess my soulmate got a tattoo,” I say. I don’t really care. The tattoo is three lines of writing. It looks like Spanish.

“I want to see it,” Jason says, and he grabs my arm. He starts trying to read it. “I think it’s Spanish. We should get Leo to read it.”

I roll my eyes. My cousins and friends are more eager to find out about my soulmate than I am. I don’t really care either way. Yes, I’ll try and cheer him up by being happy if I notice he’s upset. And I don’t care about tattoos as long as he doesn’t get any stupid ones.

Jason and Hazel practically have to drag me out of the apartment to go to school. It’s the first day back after summer, hence the early start. It’s my senior year. Percy, Annabeth, Thalia and Reyna have all graduated, but they’re staying in New York. Percy and Annabeth are going to Columbia, and Thalia and Reyna are going to NYU. I don’t want to go to college. At least not straight away. For starters, I have no idea what I’d study, but I also want to see the world first. I know that this year is important, but finals still seem so far away. The first thing I notice when I get to school is that Will Solace isn’t there. It turns out that he’s transferred to a school in Brooklyn. I don’t ask why. I just assume that he moved house.

Tip #1 for starting senior year in a new school. Try not to throw up on your desk in the first week. Trust me, I learned that the hard way. I’m sitting through my first period AP Biology lesson, where we’re learning about the hormonal regulation of childbirth. I keep having flashbacks to that time when I dreamed that I was delivering a baby satyr. Don’t ask. I have weird dreams sometimes. That makes me feel bad enough, but a sudden pain lances through my shoulder. Before I even know what’s happening, I’ve thrown up on the desk. A few members of the class laugh at me.

“Dude, your shoulder,” the guy sitting next to me says. I look at the shoulder where I felt the pain, and see that my white shirt is turning red. Confused, I look under my shirt, and I see that I’m bleeding, but there’s no wound. I’ve never heard of this happening, but it must be something to do with my soulmate. It’s the only explanation my admittedly slightly scrambled brain can come up with. I don’t bother to ask the teacher permission before I run down to the nurse’s office. I can feel the blood running down my back in rivulets. Whatever happened to my soulmate, he’s bleeding from the front and back of his shoulder. When I reach the nurse’s office, she’s as confused as I am. Her best guess is the same as mine; that my soulmate is injured and the blood is appearing on me as well. The only thing she can do is keep cleaning the blood from my unwounded shoulder, while assessing my blood pressure, because we have no way of knowing whether or not I am actually losing blood. By lunchtime, my shoulder has stopped bleeding, presumably because someone has managed to staunch the bleeding in my soulmate’s shoulder. My blood pressure didn’t change all morning, so the nurse is fairly confident that I haven’t lost any blood. She finds me a new shirt and sends me on my way.

I wake up to the sound of beeping, and the smell of antiseptic. Someone is holding my hand in both of theirs. I turn my head to see my Aunt Sally.

“Where am I?” I croak. My throat is dry, like I haven’t drunk or used my voice in days.

“Oh, honey. You’re awake,” Sally says. “You’re in hospital. You were on your way to school when someone shot you. You lost a lot of blood.”

“How long?” I ask.

“Four days, but when you survived the first, the doctors were almost certain that you’d wake up. Percy is going to be so upset that he wasn’t here. Today was his first day of class.” Sally says.

A doctor comes in then, and asks Aunt Sally to leave so that they can run some tests now that I’m awake. The tests don’t take long, and Sally comes back in with some water, which I greedily guzzle down. Even though they’ve kept me hydrated while I was unconscious, I’m still unbelievably thirsty.

I’m discharged a week later.

While I’m in my freshman year of pre-med at Columbia, I think my soulmate is travelling. I think this because I start getting tattoos. The first one is a cascade of cherry blossoms down the left side of my neck to the top of my chest. I presume he went to Japan. The second is a griffin on my left side, at the bottom of my ribcage. The third is the Manhattan skyline, with the words ‘_Not all who wander are lost’_. This is my main clue that he’s been travelling. The fourth and final tattoo is a pair of ravens on my left shoulder blade. I like to imagine that we are the ravens, flying free together. I know that I was at high school with my soulmate during junior year at least. But I don’t know anything else, and I still have no idea who he is. I wonder if he knows we were at school together. I hope he never realised. Because if we both knew but never met, then maybe it’s because he didn’t want to meet. Maybe he didn’t want to have a soulmate. While he was away, I decided to get some tattoos of my own. The first was simple, the constellation of Sagittarius, my star sign. It’s slightly to the left on the back of neck, leaving space for my soulmate’s star sign. Wishful thinking, maybe. But I want it to be possible. The second was also simple. The outline of a wave on the arch of my foot. The third one is more complicated. It’s on my lower back, below the willow tree. It’s a somewhat stylized horse, which I’ve always considered to be my spirit animal. I wonder whether the griffin is my soulmate’s spirit animal.

My year travelling is over, and I’m back in New York, at Columbia University. My adventures inspired me, and now I’m studying art and photography. I saw so many amazing landscapes, and I want to go back and take professional style photographs, not just smartphone pictures. I want to paint giant canvasses of the scenery. So now I’m learning about advanced techniques. The history of art modules aren’t so interesting but they’re a necessary evil. My desire to become the best artist I can overcomes my dislike of learning about artists who died four hundred years ago. That’s what I’m telling myself as I hurry to my next lecture, not really looking where I was going. That’s probably why I walked straight into someone hurrying in the other direction.

“Bollocks!” the person said. To my surprise, the first thought through my head isn’t along the same lines, but rather I’m thinking about how that was the word I saw written on my hip when I showered this morning. I realise then, that as much as I loved travelling on my own, I want to share the experience with someone. I want to make memories that will last forever with someone. Who better than my soulmate? I reach down to pick up the coffee cup that he dropped.

“I’m so glad that was empty,” I say. I look up to see Will Solace staring blankly at me.

“I’m so glad that was empty,” the other guy says. At first I’m so caught up with the fact that I’m going to be late for my anatomy lecture that I don’t recognise the words that first appeared on my wrist over two years ago. When it clicks, I stop. And I stare. When the guy stands up after picking up my coffee cup, I keep staring, mouth probably agape. I know him.

“Nico?...It’s you…” I say, not believing it. My first real crush was my soulmate. I don’t want to wait for him to speak so I glance down at my wrist.

_I’ve loved you since I was sixteen._

Nico says those words, and I kiss him without thinking. He hesitates for a moment before kissing me back. It’s the most incredible feeling. I’ve kissed other guys before, but never has it felt this right. This perfect. He opens his mouth slightly, and I pull gently on his lower lip as I pull away. As much as I want to keep kissing him, we need to talk. I see the cherry blossoms on the side of his neck, and run my finger along them. I glace at my wrist.

_I’ve loved you since I was sixteen._

The same words. The words that would stay there forever.

“Fuck classes,” Nico says. “We’re getting lunch.” I’ve never been happier to blow off class.

We get one last tattoo. Nico’s Aquarius constellation interlocks nicely with my Sagittarius and I feel complete. We’re perfect. I never go to med school. Nico and I make our life on the road. We get by on the fortune he inherited from his mother, and by picking up part time jobs here and there. Nico manages to sell copies of his photographs to touristy shops, but he never sells a single canvas. When we’re thirty and have visited everywhere we want to visit we return to America, his canvases adorn the walls of our house. But my favourite piece of art is the print of a weeping willow tree in the corner of our bedroom. The tree that was our first tattoo. The exact tree that Nico’s sister, Bianca is buried under. The exact tree where I first saw my dad.

**Author's Note:**

> Song is Hurts Good by R5
> 
> All characters belong to Rick Riordan


End file.
